Street Fight Daily: Yodle Plans IPO, Uber Tests Courier Service

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology

Online Advertising Company Yodle Planning IPO This Year (Wall Street Journal)
Yodle, an online advertising service for small businesses, is planning an initial public offering later this year, according to people familiar with the matter. Yodle primarily generates revenue from small-business owners by building websites and placing online ads and other marketing services, including social media, for them.

Closely Raises $3M to Turn Its Social Analytics App Into a Business (Street Fight)
Closely, the maker of Perch, a social analytics app for small businesses, has raised $3 million in a series A round of funding led by Grotech ventures. Amid a chaotic local marketing industry, the company has quietly built out a novel business model which draws on learnings from the consumer world to solve one of the most dire problems in the business technology industry: selling to small businesses.

Uber Expands Into Courier Service With Manhattan-Only Pilot (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Uber has always flirted with the idea of expanding from being a mere car service to becoming a more generalized delivery business. Now the company is taking a less whimsical approach, launching an actual courier service in Manhattan.

Reconsidering Location for On-the-Go Consumer (Street Fight)
Jeremy Ozen: Out-of-home works because it is exactly what its name implies. That’s a powerful advantage. But with great power comes great responsibility. Once we start regarding out-of-home as a behavior (specifically, of consumers on-the-go) instead of just a set of location-specific screens, our success is almost guaranteed.

Facebook Wants to Turn 25 Million Small Businesses Into Advertisers (AdAge)
To tackle the long tail, Facebook won’t build out a large customer-service teams like YP or Gannett, which specialize in local sales. The idea is to make the product intuitive and steer Facebook page administrators to “boost” posts that are performing well with some ad spend through notifications on their page.

6 Strategies for Measuring the Impact of In-Store Messaging (Street Fight)
By 2016, mobile is expected to have a $327 billion influence on in-store sales, but many of the merchants who utilize these hyperlocal technologies are having difficulty determining the true ROI of their campaigns. Here are six strategies for businesses to measure the impact of their in-store messaging campaigns.

Time Out Jumps on the Platform Bandwagon (Digiday)
The site has created a new user review product that lets users review venues and events, not just read those of Time Out’s own writers. The system, developed on top of commenting platform Livefyre, also lets readers submit photos and thoughts about events in real time.

PayPal CTO on Payments, the ‘Uber Experience,’ and Paying With Fitbit (VentureBeat)
Right now, PayPal is in a dogfight for the future of payments. And it’s a dogfight with the worst of combatants — huge, well-funded, popular companies like Google, Apple, and Square. CTO James Barrese talks about mobile and wearables, POS systems, and phone-based fingerprint sensors in a long, wide-ranging conversation.

How Advertisers Will Change Their Spending by 2016 (Wall Street Journal)
Mobile is eating up an increasingly bigger share of ad budgets, but advertisers still plan to bulk up spending on television in the years ahead. Advertisers plan to spend about $31 billion more on the mobile Internet in 2016 compared with 2013, according to data from ZenithOptimedia that was analyzed by Statista.

As Windows XP Doomsday Comes, What Does This Mean for Your POS system? (Pando)
As I hope you all know, tomorrow will be Windows XP’s “end-of-life.” Anyone running the OS will stop receiving software updates. But akin to that college final paper you’ve had all semester to write and left until one day before the deadline, many companies just haven’t taken the leap toward updating their OS.

S.F. Cracks Down on Airbnb Rentals (SFGate)
San Francisco’s ban on short-term rentals is turning out to have teeth. People who rent out space on Airbnb, VRBO and other markets for temporary housing are facing fines by the City Planning Department and eviction on the grounds of illegally operating hotels.

Survey: 85% Of SEOs Shoot For 1-5 New Local Reviews Per Month (SearchEngineLand)
Managing reviews and reputation isn’t a new discipline for search consultants and agencies to focus on, but it is gaining prominence as reviews take on more significance in the world of local search. So with his growing importance of reviews, how do search marketers approach review management and just how important are reviews vs. other local signals?